Barrett, Father John

1957, November 2

Date of Birth: 1895, September 12

Paris
April 5, 1958

My Dear Confreres:

Some months ago, on Saturday, November 2nd last – the day on which we commemorate our dead – the news of the death of our confrere, John Barrett, plunged St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore into sorrow and sadness.

It was known that his health was seriously affected by a heart attack suffered ten days earlier. However, as often happens, affection for the patient had caused an underestimation of the nearness of the danger he was in. Father Barrett did not have the consolation of being called to God in the midst of his St. Mary’s brethren, but in faraway Michigan, where he had gone to pay a visit to one of his friends and classmates, Father Clarence Doherty.

His death was regarded by all as a personal grief. Actually, Father Barrett was the last survivor of the first group of Sulpicians who, in the fall of 1929, had opened the new building at Roland Park. Since then he had always stayed there; and, particularly in his last years, he had been the symbol of the permanence of a St. Mary’s tradition, the living bond between the priests of yesterday and those of today. With his death, a last chapter was finished in the story of the first faculty of the new seminary. We can only join our American confreres in mourning the last witness of a great epoch.

John Daniel Barrett was born on September 12, 1895, at Frostburg, Maryland, which – so to speak – he was not to leave. After his studies in the school of the local parish, he went to the Christian Brothers High School in the nearby city. In 1914 he was admitted to St. Charles College in Catonsville. But as he had never studied Latin or Greek, he had to stay there for five years, finishing up in 1919.

He then quite naturally entered St. Mary’s Seminary on Paca Street, and he spent two years there going through the Philosophy cycle. For his Theology he was sent to the Sulpician Seminary in Washington (now Theological College of The Catholic University of America). Already failing in health, he was several times obliged to interrupt his studies. To complete them, he took up residence in St. Charles College, teaching a little Latin and Mathematics while finishing by himself the Theology tracts he was missing by not being at the Sulpician Seminary. In September 1925, he received priestly ordination in St. Mary’s chapel at the hands of Bishop Hafey of Raleigh.

From before his ordination, Father Barrett had been attracted to the work of clergy formation and had asked to enter the Society of St. Sulpice. Archbishop Curley of Baltimore, ever our loyal friend, without any hesitation, gave him permission to join. He again went to Washington to take a licentiate in Canon Law. He stayed there two years. Later on, in spite of the jobs entrusted to him, he managed to give himself time for research on his own. In 1932, he obtained his doctorate on producing a thesis entitled: “Comparative Study of the Councils of Baltimore and the Code of Canon Law,” an eminently practical work which became a great help to the American bishops, facilitating the adaptation of local customs to the universal legislation of the Church.

On his leaving The Catholic University in 1927, Father Barrett was appointed to teach Canon Law at the Paca Street seminary. In the following year he was sent to make his Solitude in the mansion near St. Charles College, the mansion which sheltered so many of our American confreres. Admitted to the Society at the end of his novitiate, he was sent to teach Canon Law at Roland Park to which the upper three years of Theology had just been transferred. He was to fill that post for twenty-six years. Endowed with a clear and penetrating intelligence, he knew how to make the students love a subject often unappreciated by reason of the difficulties inherent in its very nature and the difficulties involved in its scheduling in a syllabus too restrictive to accommodate the programs that had to be distributed in it.

A state of failing health which progressively cut down his activity forced him in 1955 to give up his courses.

We cannot, however, confine our consideration of Father Barrett’s work only to teaching. He was a born teacher, but also much more than a teacher. When he came to Roland Park, he was still a relatively young man, having just passed thirty. He nevertheless showed himself equal to his heavy responsibilities as a seminary director and as an active member of the faculty which was responsible for the successful operation of a fairly large house and as a spiritual director – jobs which he kept to the end. Without reckoning the cost, he spent himself for the seminarians. His acquiescence in their service became in some measure proverbial. It might be asked if ever another Sulpician knew so many students personally as did Father Barrett. For the seminarians he was more than a friend. For them he symbolized the priest completely dedicated to the job of helping others to attain priesthood. For almost thirty years the students found in him an understanding soul who did not pay any heed to his own problems while resolving the spiritual problems whose solutions they were seeking. His complete good will, his readiness at all times to come to the help of those who sought his support, will for long cause his memory to be held in benediction by vast numbers.